An analysis of NYC's 2018 Squirrel Census
A Squirrel's World
In New York, Squirrels are everywhere. They're basically New York City's unofficial mascot (right behind Pizza rat).
You see them climbing up trees, munching on acorns, terrorizing tourists, and more.
As such, it only seemed right to conduct a survey of all squirrels to find all we can about our favorite cute little animal.
Thus, in the October of 2018, more than 200 volunteers descended on Central Park to conduct the 2nd most important census on American soil. Here's what they found:
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Comparing Fur Colors
Let’s start with a simple bar plot comparing the counts of squirrels by their fur color.
It’s obvious to us very early on that (Eastern) Gray squirrels absolutely dominate and knock the other fur colors out of the park (yes, pun intended). There’s almost as many juvenile Gray squirrels as there are Cinnamon squirrels. Such a huge gap in populations could be due to a variety of factors from genetics to environment, and more.
Let’s see if there any differences come up between squirrels of different fur colors when looking at other features of our data.
Squirrel Sightings Throughout Census Period
We see that there is often variation with the squirrels seen each day, possibly due to a change in the number of volunteers each day. Still, with the information we have, time does not appear to cause any surge in any particular fur color of squirrels. The sighting numbers each day generally share the same pattern each day (look at the Gray and Cinnamon lines particularly).
The Height of Squirrels
Most of the time, the volunteers found the squirrels on the ground. There were some instances, however, where the squirrels were found looking down at the world. If the squirrel was first found above ground, their height was recorded. Maybe there is a difference in the heights squirrels are willing to go based on their fur color?
Nope. They all tend to occupy the same space in the realm above. Gray squirrels were occasionally found 50 ft (or more) above ground but that may just be that there are more Gray squirrels to find in general.
Maps of Squirrels
Above, we see every single squirrel sighting (almost 3,000) during the 2-week period of the census. (Wow, that’s a lot of squirrels)
We can even animate our map to show where the squirrels were found each day…
…and even by the morning or afternoon shift:
From these, we can see that Cinnamon and Black squirrels tend to be found in the same areas, which makes sense. There is strength in numbers when there’s not many of you. We can also observe that squirrels tend to not appear as much in open field areas such as ‘The Great Lawn’, ‘Sheep’s Meadow’, and ‘East Meadow.’ These areas feature almost no trees (except for on the edges) and are often filled with actual humans having picnics, playing sports, etc. which sway the squirrels away.
Next, we can actually create a density heatmap to better identify the most popular squirrel congregation areas:
The most popular area for squirrels in aggregate is ‘The Ramble’, “the most well-known of the Park’s three woodland landscapes”. With an abundance of trees and nuts here, it’s not hard to see why it’s the hottest squirrel club around.
We can separate our density heatmap by fur color too:
